Regarding a @joyannreid controversy

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With respect to this Buzzfeed item just posted, my comment via Facebook is no showing up there. I will ask friends to direct readers here.

 

 

There's a lot of misinformation about this already (what a surprise?). Joy-Ann never claimed the archive was "hacked." She simply said it was under investigation and they were examining all possible causes. Pundits and trolls simply transformed that into "I was hacked." Nonsense.

I am the one who found the posts in the archive back in December and brought them to Joy's attention. She was absolutely stunned by every word in them. We read them aloud together. She'd obviously never seen any of them, and had no idea what else there was to see until I pointed each item out. Though she was obviously upset, we were laughing at what a terrible job they had done trying to sound like her. We both felt no one would take such poor forgeries seriously.

Even so, I was in favor of her immediately outing the story herself (as it was shortly after the Crist apology), but she said contractually, NBC would have to make that decision. She could not. 

Since the blog was also the source of the Charlie Crist comments, obviously she would have rushed to expunge anything so toxic if she could. That I had to bring them to her attention is all the proof I needed to know that none of these words were hers. 

But just for my own edification, I spent hours trying to find a single ping-back, reblog, or pull-quote with any part of this material in them. There was nothing. There is still nothing. No a trace of these words anywhere but the Internet Archive.

My own theory is that one of those "other entities" the Wayback machine people discussed was actually the bad actor who had been inside her original blogger.com site all along, and was feeding material through it to her WordPress blog (which was set up to do that for herself but she stopped using it, but never disconnected the pass-thru). She never considered that perhaps she had an unwelcome editor in her blog until I suggested it.

Note:  I do not mean here the Archive.org browser plugin used  to  submit new material to the archive in normal archive usage.  I mean that the bad actor simply insured that their latest changes made into he archive (in case Joy caught on to the errant posts).  Only detailed analysis of a lot of information that neither blogger.com, nor archive.org seems willing to provide.

We may never know the full story, or catch this culprit. But I was there. These words were as new to Joy as they were to everyone else. The person who published these things has been trolling Joy for years. I strongly suspect he's known they were there all along, and was just playing them out over time to inflict maximum damage.

I am confident that Joy's millions of fans will support her, once all these facts are known. Homophobic personalities don't just post a few blog items and call it a day. They have a lifetime of breadcrumbs that can be found. I am quite sure none can or ever will be found that can be credibly—or even plausibly—attributed to her.

This was just a setup from one of her many enemies, most of whom have very good reasons to fear her powerful voice.

BAD NEWS: Your Retweeted Outrage Is Rarely Seen (Heard) on Twitter

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To begin, an apology…

I've been meaning to post this for years. I apologize for only discussing it on Twitter before now.  It's actually a very important thing to know, and most don't know it, and tips merely tweeted are usually lost in the clutter and noise of the Internet ether.  That said, let's move on…

Your retweets are not seen as often as you may think.

Most now know that social media can have a dramatic impact on the news, and our reactions, once registered, can sometimes make an impact. 

But one of the most common mistakes people make on Twitter is assuming that simply retweeting a tweet will somehow transmit their position or outrage to not only their own followers (which it will), but also to the @target person triggering the outrage, often @mentioned in a tweet or thread.  But unfortunately, due to the way Twitter works, which most people still don't really understand very well, it won't.  Unless their Retweet is the very first retweet, it is effectively invisible.. 

Why? Because RTs are only only seen ONCE (over about 24 hours). If not for that built-in throttling, @users — especially @celebrities — would be overwhelmed by thousands of RTs aimed at them every hour.  

So, if yours is not the first retweet (which it rarely will be), it is simply added to the "retweet count" (see #1 below) for that tweet, and your avatar is added to its list of avatars retweeting it (#2). And even those are limited to the first 100 users retweeting it.

 

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Since almost no one ever looks at that list of Retweeting avatars anyway (they aren't even visible in Tweetdeck and most other client Twitter programs), your "voice" is essentially unseen, and effectively unheard. Thus, below you see 3 people retweeting an urgent tweet of mine to a TV show host. Most think they are helping me amplify my appeal, assuming the @AmJoyShow or @joyannreid show will see their retweeted echo of my tweet.  But as I've just explained, they won't.

 

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So, how can your voice be heard?

It's very simple: just don't rely on simple retweets.  When you want your take, co-sign, or outrage to register with a @target account, you have these two options:

  1. "Quote/Comment" the tweet instead.  That way, your @target will see an ORIGINAL tweet (yours), which can also include the tweet you are trying to amplify.  For example:

     

     

     

     

     

    dd

     

     

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  2. Copy and Paste into an original tweet.  Adding the classic "RT" signal before your text is recommended, but optional.  Your mention will be seen with or without it. Example:

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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As a bonus, a twofer!  The visibility of your original tweet will be doubled when just one of your followers retweets it. 

So there you have it 

And if you're thinking, "Oh crap, thanks a pantload, Shoq. All those years of railing and flailing at people with my RTs, and only my own followers saw it? Did I really need to know this?" 

I'm really sorry about that, but I'm only the messenger.  And after years on Twitter, I'm pretty much bulletproof, so it just makes no sense to shoot me. Let's just move on. Remember this basic rule going forward:  

If you want to be seen/heard, ALWAYS use a quoted tweet, or a simple copy and paste into a new tweet.

Related

Many of your @mentions may not be seen either:  See: So What Does Dot (Period) Mean In Front of Some Twitter Replies (.@)

My other Twitter Tips:  http://shoqvalue.com/twittertips

 

Please Share this Tip

Use this easy to remember short link:  j.mpretweetwarning

A Curated Tweet Storm By @Fawfulfan That All American Journalists, Politicians & Citizens Should Read

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.@CNN's @BrianStelter — whom I greatly admire for his steady (if a bit uneven) growth as one of the few TV journalists to even marginally criticize our cratering media megaplex—alerted me to the tweet storm below by Matthew Chapman. Matt and I have followed each other for quite some time. He's a programmer, contributor to Blue Nation Review, and generally a very wise and insightful young man with a helluva lot to say.

Below is a tweet collection I've curated of a recent rant, wherein Matt says some of those things with a rare clarity that I just had to capture for posterity.  Things that every American needs to hear in order to even begin to understand how our media and journalism are failing us every day with a constant Gish-Galloping cavalcade of ridiculous conservative propagandists with their equally ridiculous agendas, ideas, memes, contrived tropes, and cynical lies.  Not merely during this hideous 2016 election, but virtually all the time.  We have been  awash in media tripe for almost a generation now, and our country and culture are drowning in it.


Accurate, dramatic, eloquent, and on-point, eh? 

There just isn't that much to say. But there sure is a lot to talk about.

Naturally, and despite his best efforts, Brian Stelter is a made-man in the ecosystem of horrendous ethical fails that is @CNN, a network which Chapman is indirectly lambasting in his rant, so he felt compelled to tack on the "I disagree with some of it…" With apologies to him, who I really do like and admire, that was today's Twitter-sensitive journalist code-speak to set up the obligatory "of course, both sides share some of the blame…" 

No, Brian, no they do not. And you know they don't. See Chapman's many sidebar tweets (within his storm) with the always manipulative and disingenuous propagandist, @ABC's @MatthewJDowd, one of the worst purveyors of "the big lie" that "both sides do it."

 

Please Brian Stelter…

…read Matt's storm again below, and discuss which exact remarks you disagree with on @reliablesources this coming Sunday.  Be very specific, because it's hard for any regular observer or our media malaise to disagree with much of what he's said, or the examples he's given. 

Then do a really unique thing: have some of the people who regularly address our ubiquitous media malpractice to discuss all of this. And not with the same old #bothsides bullshit artists from the @CNN bullpen. Use people who actually understand how the media (and right-wing propaganda) work. Get to the heart of the matter of why your colleagues in the media (and your complicit boss, Jeff Zucker) continually practice this ruinous ritual of propagating endless hours of vapid, calorie-free coverage of ginned-up, right-wing counter-factual nonsense. It's a toxic stew of preventable malfeasance that is steadily and efficiently eroding our nation's ability to address a manufactured and cynically nurtured state of affairs where polarization, rancor, and institutionalized dysfunction are almost all our media can discuss, while simultaneously generating more of it . 

We are not addressing issues. We are not holding people accountable. We are not governing. We are not telling the truth.  Not to anyone in America, nor the entire world. And media is, if not entirely to blame, certainly to be blamed for making it all worse and impeding any efforts to make anything better.

And rather than do this with one more banal round of the Hollywood Squares-type panel discussion, why not host a @CNN town-hall on "What's Wrong With The Media," and invite people like (off the top of my head), Matt Chapman himself (@fawfulfan), but also: @ericboehlert, @mr_electrico and @bluegal, @sarahkendzior, @jeffcot, @owillis, @docrocktex26, @rickperlstein, @mattgertz, @joestrupp, @gabrielSherman, @crampell, @peterdaou, @kimlacapria, @tommyxtopher, @normorenstein, @bobcesca_go, @chezPazienza, @queenofspain, @johnfugelsang, @frankSesno, @katrinaNation, @karoli, @greenfield64, @cshirky, @goAngelo, @davidbrockCNN, @electablog, @tvhilton, @tomwatson, @zeynep, @fmkaplan, @juddlegum, and of course, the leading media critics from @snopes, @pewresearch and @politifact.

I'd include some conservative media critcs, but there are no serious ones. There never have been. And since those people posited as being such always say precisely the same thing, what would be the point? And besides, the execrable fringers and bomb throwing fanatics like @newtGingrich, @HughHewitt, @RealJeffreyLord, @SECupp and @ScottieNhughes are on @CNN every day suggesting that their willful lying and conservative propaganda are "exactly the same" as what liberals are complaining about when they illustrate how the media has abdicated any interesting in real journalism or truth telling.  It's what they are paid to do, as you know, and what all of you in the media have been complicit in enabling.

Please stop it, American media. Stop it before you've demolished whatever is still left of this once-proud country and its values and achievements that have led the world for so much of the past century.  You have children. And they will have children. You own it to all of them, and to all of us, to just stop this feeding frenzy of ratings-driven political media fail. 

You can still make money. You'll just sleep better. We all will.